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Thursday, 13 February 2014

Salma Yaqoob: Fomer Leader of Respect

First posted: 30th March, 2010

[Salma Yaqoob is the third woman from the right.]

IntroductionSalman
Yaqoob was born in 1971. (That was three years after ‘68’ and at least
two years before ‘73’.) She was born in the ‘dark satanic city’ (John
‘Motson’ Motty) of Bradford, 200 miles north of Islington and 1000 miles west of Pakistan.
(Salma Yaqoob is known as ‘Salma Yaqoob’ to her friends, of which she
has a hundred and one – some of whom are her friends.) She is the leader
of Respect – the Unity Coalition, which is a unity of Muslims, far leftists, Muslims, far leftists, Muslims and the Rev Ray Gaston. Yaqoob is also a Birmingham City Councillor in the city of Birmingham.
Her motto is ‘Us Brummies Together!’ which she coined while on a visit
to Pakistan to engage with the Pakistani-wing of Respect, Jamaat e-Islami. She is also the head of the Birmingham Stop the Infidel Wars Coalition (see Islam and the Abode ofWar) and a spokesperson for BirminghamCentral Mosque, in the center of Birmingham. The moderate nature of this mosque was graphically seen when Channel 4
‘cobbled together’ various clips of joint-smoking imans saying nice
things about ‘gay boys’ and the need to ‘respect diversity’.

Salami Yaboob also does stuff for the red-fascist street-fighting group, Unite Against White Fascism.

Upbringing

She
has lost her once very strong Bradford (Grammar) accent. She now has a
very strong Brummie accent, which goes down a treat at Birmingham and Islington
dinner parties. Despite differing views within her local community, her
father was determined to support his children's education at the
Bradford schools which were guaranteed to be free from poor Bangladeshi boys and girls. She studied Psychology and Diversity at university and then became a Islamo-Trotskyist psycho.

Stuff

In her youth she was concerned about the treatment of women in countries such as Pakistan and cities like Bradford, and even considered converting to Christianity (so as to able to frequently speak and write about ‘nearly converting to Christianity’ to the Guardian and Radio 4 in future years). However she concluded that ‘the Koran gave women more rights than the kufr’s
Bible - the rights to stay at home and wear the niqab or hijab’. She
began wearing the hijab herself at 18 (which is when she started to wear
the hijab). She sees the Koran ‘as a rad-fem manual with lots of stuff
on female masturbation and women’s collectives’. ‘The Prophet Mohammad
himself, peace be beneath him,’ according to Yaqoob, ‘was a New Man and
he simply adored the work of Sapho.’ He also ‘knew how to change the
nappies of his many wives, especially the nine-year-old Aisha’s nappie’.

Yaqoob became more politically active after the Twin Towers’ ‘reprisal attack’ of September 11th 2001. She made a memorable appearance as an audience plant on the political BBC programme Question Time
just days after the attacks were celebrated by her fellow Muslims. This
appearance became a somewhat infamous episode due to the large number
of moderate Muslim activists in the audience who made explicit reference
to the widely held view that 9/11 was tied in with the American government's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East
region, which is precisely what Yaqoob believes (but in a quieter
manner). The BBC eventually apologised to the American ambassador for
his treatment on the programme. Salmon herself was very upset that she
had been spat at in the street in the days following the attacks
(something she 'doesn’t like talking about before breakfast').

It
has been suggested that she played a crucial role in inviting fellow
Muslims into an anti-war movement previously dominated by Marxists and the SWP, but now dominated by Marxists, the SWP and Muslims.
This ‘was not surprising because the wars were against Muslims and not
against Marxists’ (though ‘Saddam Hussein was a Marxist’, according to George MohammadGalloway)
.She has argued against the idea, put forward by what she calls
religious fundamentalists and sectarian right-wingers, that Muslims and
non-Muslims cannot work together, as well as against what she claims are
calls for Muslims to ‘keep their heads down when bombs go off’ from
within the Muslim community. She said that these ‘religious
fundamentalists’ came from the wrong parts of Pakistan and, in any case,
‘us Muslims should bide our time and wait for Western civilisation to
give them the keys to the kingdom completely’. As for the ‘sectarian
right-wingers’, Yaqoob said that ‘her all-Muslim and all-Pakistani
Respect Party would fight against all examples of sectarianism’. Yaqoob
also said that she ‘prefers sectarian left-wingers to sectarian
right-wingers’.

Yaqoob had very little experience of far-left
politics prior to September 11 although she had been involved in the
'Justice for the Yemen Seven' campaign after her family became embroiled
in the proceedings. This campaign was to support seven (later, eight)
British Muslims who were accused by the Yemeni authorities for terrorist
activities in its capital Sana’a in December 1998.

Yaqoob said that
this was ‘shear prejudice because everyone knows that Muslims are never
terrorists – the terrorists are actually Jainists’.

After their
conviction, protests and lobbying in Britain eventually resulted in
release of most of them. Since then, her penchant for Islamist
terrorists and their ‘reprisal attacks’ has grown and grown and is the
main reason why she is asked to write for the Guardian at least once a week.

Yaqoob also wrote an article in a Muslim affairs magazine, Trends, edited by Idiot Bunglingwallah (the ‘Beardless One’), which forcasted, in three to four months, an Islamic Republic of Great Britain. The article concluded with the author Salman Rushdie
having his bollocks removed by Yaqoob herself. Although many
commentators said ‘the article was just tongue-in-cheek’, Yaqoob herself
insists that she ‘was deadly serious when she wrote it’.

At the Clash of Civilisations conference, organised by Ken Livingstone on 20 January 2007, Salma Yaqoob described the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London as ‘reprisal attacks’. Yaqoob, and Red Ken’s best friend moderate extremist, Yusuf al-Qaradawi(Arabic:
يوسف القرضاوي), both said: ‘We are unequivocally against terrorism –
Western terrorism against Muslims.’ The greatest ‘acts of terrorism’
included freeing Iraq of Saddam’s regime, piping billions of pounds into the Pakistani, Egypt and Saudi Arabian states, Bush and Blair’s
visits to mosques after 9/11, and only allowing British Muslims to
build around 50 mosques each year in the UK. They ‘would not tolerate
such acts of terrorism’.

Politics

In the 2005 general election, she stood as the Respect candidate for the Birmingham Islamic Republic of Sparkbrook constituency against Labour's Roger Allahsiff MP, with the backing of the officially moderate Moderate Muslim Association of (Not Great) Britain.
She finished in second place, ahead of the Liberal Democrat and
Conservative candidates, and with 27.5% of the total vote – which means
that 73.5% voters were non-Muslims, which Yaqoob said ‘is a racist
disgrace!’ During the campaign, Yaqoob had faced harassment and death
threats from her family, her husband and al Ghurabaa, a takfiri Islamist group later banned under the Terrorism Act 2006
(which Yaqoob otherwise spoke out against). Al-Ghurabaa claimed that it
is an act of apostasy for Muslims to participate in Western democratic
elections, and its members defaced her election posters with the word ‘Kafir.'
Yaqoob replied saying that she ‘is undermining secular democracy from
within’. But Al-Ghurabaa didn’t believe her because she was having so
much fun as the First Muslim Lady of Birmingham. And Yaqoob herself said that she would only ever use the term kafir if it were applied to non-Muslims and that it is unfair to use it in any other context.

Yaqoob was elected with 49.4% of the vote in the Sparkbrook ward of Birmingham City Council
in the 2006 UK local election. This means that about 51% of voters in
Sparkbrook are either non-Muslim or belonged to the wrong Pakistani
tribe (i.e., not Yaqoob’s). She claimed that her election ‘challenged
the traditional conservatism that denies leading public positions to
women, and challenged the old order, which treats our communities as
silent voting fodder. And it was only possible because we united people
around a progressive message of anti-racism and social justice.’ She
‘promised not to challenge the racism of Pakistan, the Sudan and Suadi
Arabia’ because she didn’t ‘like interfering in the affairs of other
countries, unless that other country is Israel or the US’.

1 comment:

"Today, King Charles abdicatedfrom the throne and left the countryto retreat into the Himalayanmountains to live as a Buddhistmonk following pressure from thepublic for Britain to become anIslamic shariah state. His son Williambin Charlie, having been involved inthe Young Muslims for some time, isdetermined to give the people whatthey want - and is now known asthe Ameer." The news, announcedby a scarf-clad Zainab Badawi, wasreceived with takbirs resounding inliving rooms across the nation.Headlines included 'A political andmoral victory for Britain' by Al-Asr(formerly The Times), and 'GotchaBritain!' by Al-Shams (formerly TheSun, which is still somewhat laggingbehind!).So how did this extraordinary turnof events come about? JudgePickles (Achaar for short) expressedhis outrage by declaring:"It's the woman's fault, she wasasking for it." And indeed thisappeared to be the case. Twomillion women marched toParliament last week demandingtheir rights for an equitable status inaccordance with Shariah (IslamicLaw).The women's actions have added tocalls from other directions for theimplementation of the Shariah. Onecampaigner protesting against theusury system - who had been madehomeless following failure to keepup with mortgage repayments -explained:"The interest rates kept going up.The interest I was getting from mysavings account just becamemeaningless to me — especiallywhen I didn't have any money leftin there! I was amazed when I wastold about the Islamic economicsystem - it's so fair to everyone. Iwould never go back to the old wayagain now.""Not even if we promised youdouble the interest rate in yoursavings account?""Never" was the firm reply.It was not just the (capitalist)Conservatives who were alarmed bythe surge in public pressure forchange — (lefty) Labour MP's havebeen equally worried. Theattraction of a basic tax of just 2.5%has proved to be irresistible andunable to be matched by anypolitical party, least of all theLabour Party.The Minister for Culture (MaqsoodAl-Rashid) allayed fears that BigBen would be replaced by aminaret, and that all non—Muslimswould be forced to convert at thepoint of a sword. He said:"Most British institutions are notcontradictory to Islam, and will infact continue with their functions,merely enhancing and serving thenew British Islamic Civilisation. Asto the question of non-Muslims; theQur'an itself states that there is nocompulsion in religion, and who arewe to argue with the Qur'an?".In addition the Minister for Healthhas verified rumours that doctors onthe NHS will have more time to besympathetic to their patients,following a ban on alcohol and areduction in smoking: the two majorcauses of illness in Britain. Also,initial fears of an increase inone-handed people, due to theimplementation of Hadood(punishment), have not beenrealised — and at the same timecrime figures have been droppingdramatically.Indeed the energy and passion ofthe youth now have a new focus.Mosques across the land are bracingthemselves for Friday Night Fever,where issues of faith are hotlydebated and nights are spent inQ iyyam—ul—Layl.It seems the whole country is alivewith hope and expectation. Peoplethe world over are looking to theIslamic Republic of Great Britain,and Immigrations is inundated withapplications for entry visas. Thepromise of material gain has nowbeen superseded by the promise forspiritual gain.However, one lone man wasspotted walking hurriedly towardsDepartures in Heathrow Airport.His face was not recognisable as hewas wearing dark glasses and had abeard. But on closer scrutiny heappeared to be clutching a book tohis chest and the words "SatanicVerses" were just visible''

The Labour Party, on the whole, isn't a Marxist or a communist party. However, there are very many cross-currents and interactions between the Labour Party and the Trotskyist/communist Left, mainly on the periphery but also deeper within.

As for the Fabian Society, it isn't a “revolutionary" (as in violent revolution) organisation but it is still, nonetheless, uniquely dangerous and elitist. Its approach to "radically changing society" is very similar to that taken by the followers of the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci.